Gauri Gill

Born in 1970 in Chandigarh, India, Gauri Gill is a Delhi-based artist. Working in both black-and-white and colour photography, Gill’s immersive and complex practice reflects several lines of pursuit, guided by thoughtful, intimate and diverse inquiries into rural, indigenous, marginalized and diasporic Indian communities. Her work reveals a human concern for people, emphasising resilience and humour, resistance and uncanny beauty, explored through the critical markers of caste, class and community as determinants of culture, mobility and social behaviour - a distilled empathy gained from prolonged periods of interaction with the communities she photographs, and a conceptual rigor applied to the material afterwards.

She has exhibited her work widely within India and around the world. In 2022, her first major survey exhibition opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023. Gill’s work has been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023); BAMPFA, Berkeley (2020); the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019); Chobimela, Dhaka (2019); Chennai Photo Biennale (2021, 2019); Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2018); Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); 7th Moscow Biennale (2017); Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); San Jose Museum of Art (2015); The Wiener Library, London (2014); and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), among other places. She has also consistently exhibited at locations outside of the art world, including public libraries, rural schools and non-profit institutions.

Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Museum, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Fotomuseum, Winterthur.

Gill received the prestigious Prix Pictet Photography and Sustainability Award in 2023. In 2022, Gill was the Inaugural Roberta Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, California; in 2018, she was a recipient of an India Today Art Award, New Delhi; in 2013 she was Creative Arts Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio; in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography; and in 2002 she received the Fifty Crows Award (formerly called the Mother Jones) in San Francisco.

Gill has recently published two books with Edition Patrick Frey about her collaborations with rural artists, titled Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023).

The artist lives and works in New Delhi, India.